Alright, here's the OOC thread, and here's how I'm thinking this will work.

1. I'm going to try to keep to a roughly twice-weekly update schedule, to keep us from forgetting about this whole thing.

2. We're genning using Eclipse Phase with a couple additional things. One, you're genning an infomorph only, and two, under your name I want you to put two Declarations. Your Declarations are essentially what your character wants to be known for. They're one-word public summaries of your intent, and everyone will instantly know what they are, as well as your name, upon seeing you, because that's all public social data in the City. Examples might be: Singing, Justice, Strength, or Friendly. Everyone has two, no more and no less.

3. You may have noticed the subforum for polls. The City is a direct democracy, every significant issue is posted up for a public vote. Votes themselves are private, but any comments are not. Feel free to post up additional polls and vote on ones that are already there, and feel free to make up NPCs to comment on those polls, but remember to post their name and declarations at the beginning of any comments they make, and don't be surprised if I use those characters in the game.

I think that's it for now, if you have any questions or general OOC stuff, here's the place to post it.

I've got stories for any group of characters you folk might come up with, so don't worry about making a balanced group. Also, this isn't likely to be a combat-heavy game. It is possible to alter your immediate surroundings using Programming, but the more you try to change, the harder it will be, and you'll need to get yourself admin clearance before you can alter things without putting it to a vote. Otherwise, even though you're technically code inside a machine, you will still be using ordinary skills for things. Jumping a gap will require the same skills in the City as it would on any Earth-gravity world.

Oh, one thing I forgot to mention: At this particular moment, I'm not really concerned about the crunch mechanics of your characters. What's much more important right now is who your character is and what their histories and backstories might be.

I know my guy's definitely not the programmer type, more the sociological type. Fascinated with community and faith, probably a religious scholar who is interested in the evolution of belief pre and post-fall. I think he wants to stay in the city as a way of studying the malleability of truth and the power of trends to shape environment and culture. He's also very interested to see if anything in this crazy hab can remain permanent with democracy ruling absolutely everything.

Punishments for crimes are put to a vote, but crimes are evaluated by a judge, who offers their opinions on what is to be done and puts possible penalties to a vote. The usual options for votes are Exile/Imprisonment, but in extremely rare cases they can be Imprisonment/Deletion. The current democratically-elected judge is Constace : Justice, Mercy, but the position goes up for election in a few months. She's running for re-election, and her main competition for the position are Mills : Security, Peace, and Galfred : Logic, Truth.

The Cloud is essentially a wandering group of infomorphs who beam wirelessly from one server to another. In exchange for taking up server space for a while, they offer information and interesting programs from other servers, since servers aren't typically in good range of one another. The course of the Cloud is regular because it's based on when any two given servers come close enough to one another to hop over.

The standard stereotype of a Cloud migrant is something of a bon vivant, interested mostly in learning what new and interesting things they can find wherever they are, so many servers go out of their way to try to impress them on arrival. Cloud migrants do not have Declarations.